In sticking to my theme on hiring that first employee, I’ve been searching the web for useful resources on the subject. I came across this great piece on what to think about in the process of hiring a new employee.

This post leads you through 5 amazing tips that will guide you through this new, exciting business phase.

Here’s an example:

3. Hire attitude, not skills. You’ll be working hard and spending lots of stressful time with your employee. Choose a simpatico go-getter rather than a collection of skills. Usually, if an applicant is smart, eager and open-minded, skills and training will come easily, especially in a multi-tasking small business. Barbara Corcoran founded her well-known New York City residential real-estate firm, The Corcoran Group, in 1973 with only $1,000. She now manages more than a thousand employees in a company that racks up a mind-boggling $5 billion a year. Her formula for hiring?”Find an expander and a container and put them together. Hire opposites and lock them at the hip.” That pairing works because they complement each other and they don’t threaten the other’s territory, says Corcoran, who recently published a business handbook-cum-memoir called If You Don’t Have Big Breasts, Put Ribbons on Your Pigtails.

“There’s mutual respect for each other because they realize they can’t do what the other does. It’s a mistake to put a container in the lead without an expander and it’s a mistake to put an expander in the lead without a container.”

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Tech accelerator 500 Startups has accepted 21 new companies, and none of these hot new entrepreneurs are your typical Silicon Valley soon-to-be CEO. For one, most of them are not from the U.S.:

500 Startups founder Dave McClure has been actively looking at companies internationally and in his latest selection of companies, 30% of the founders are from outside the U.S. The 21 new companies include entrepreneurs from Australia, Chile, Mexico, Estonia, Hong Kong, Japan, and Taiwan. An interesting tidbit is how he finds these new pieces of 500 Startups. It’s said that Dave McClure organizes something called Geeks on a Plane, a traveling squad of entrepreneurs and investors that travel around the world to South America, East Asia and Europe to find new batches of untapped talent. There are also a number of U.S. companies from outside Silicon Valley in his latest pick.